


✿ ❀ ❁

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: F/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 06:43:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5575114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>building and rebuilding</p>
            </blockquote>





	✿ ❀ ❁

It is the spring equinox, and with tensions running as high as they have been so recently, Marianne is relieved to see that the Bog King has accept her invitation. Technically it's on behalf of the entire kingdom, but she presented it to him over their sheets of blueprints for the new stronghold in the evening when it was just the two of them, as her self, and he accepted it the same way. The upside is that they're fostering a clear and diplomatic state of peace in the wake of the Primrose Fiasco (or the "whole flaming shitake storm" as she's heard Stuff and Thang call it). The downside is that Bog clearly has no idea what to do at this kind of formal and elegant function, and when he's uncomfortable everyone around him is too. Marianne watches him from the cluster of nobility her father has drawn her into, as he always does to "meet your future vassals".

Bog King did not accompany Marianne into the chamber where the Fieldland Court was gathering. He lurked instead—“born to lurk,” Marianne is tempted to sing at him, “oh honey,”—under the shadow of the arch just outside, his back against the twists of wood. Fairies who hadn’t properly met him yet shifted uneasily around him, avoiding eye contact. He's hunched on himself, glaring at nothing, utterly alone. Where has his retinue disappeared off to? He probably dismissed them to better focus on being miserable. On the long table inside, a garden of flowers have been arranged among the delicate cups and bowls of drink, huge and magnificent. Marianne scoops a droplet of water from a white one, drooped like a tear, and brings it back to the goblin in the archway.

“Do you creatures ever stop _singing_?” he mutters, glancing sourly at the chorus arranging itself at the far end of the hall.

“Songs can do more than you think,” Marianne replies. She enjoys knowing more than Bog about any number of topics, and has been known to deliberately affect mystery just to torture him. She smiles into her cup.

“They can annoy me,” Bog retorts. “Will someone please at least _attempt_ to fight for dominance? I’m not sure I can take any more three-verse cheers.”

Marianne takes his arm. He resists the pull at first, scrunching himself even tighter against the high curve of the entrance, but she’s no lightweight herself.  She drags him out into the chamber but keeps near enough to the wall that Bog won’t have to deal with all eyes turning to him at once. She might be pushy—she is pushy, okay—but she doesn’t want to ruin his evening. On the contrary. She wants to share something with him.

“Here,” she says, settling them both into place at the very edge of the choral alcove. “Give it a chance, okay?”

Bog grumbles but he stays. She’s put him closest to the wall, and it’s clear he appreciates it. He leans a shoulder against hers, without looking down. In the alcove a few feet away, the chorus is humming softly, tuning up. The conductor is twirling her baton, eyes closed, visualizing something too complex for Marianne to guess at. Singing is instinctual for fairies, just like elves—just like goblins too, she knows, although they don’t approach it the same way. Marianne had a little training as a child, and so she knows what notes are and how melodies work in the most general sense. The conductor is privy to knowledge that Marianne can only dream of.

“See how they all breathe in unison?” Marianne points out, nudging Bog slightly. “Fairies have a difficult time singing in groups. It takes a lot of preparation and training.”

The hum rises through her. It grows until it seems to permeate the very walls, vibrating the huge petals of the flowers behind them. The singers lift their chins, eyes blinking open, and then the hum breaks into one thrilling, perfect note. Every eye is on the conductor. She breathes deeply. She lifts her hand.

Music pours over the chamber, impossibly deep with the currents of twelve voices in perfect harmony. Marianne feels herself lift, straining to leave the ground beneath her feet.

“Oh,” Bog says, breathy and a little bewildered.

Behind them—Marianne has the presence of mind to quietly turn Bog’s attention—the buds placed among the cups and saucers are blooming. They unfold delicate and unsteady like newborns, in a wave that carries from one end of the room to the other, and Marianne knows that it goes on past that even now, down the walls and into the gardens and out through the fields, unfurling and untwisting the petals of untold flowers.

“It can do magic,” she says, trying not to sound smug. It will ruin the mood. If she fails, Bog doesn’t seem to notice.

“That’s,” he starts, sounding a little dry around the throat, “that’s really something.”

✿ ❀ ❁

Marianne flips a hammer like a throwing knife, hands balancing and counter balancing the unwieldy thing without any particular input from her wandering thoughts. There's a dim racket coming from the lower floors, where they're laying down furniture in one of the newly carved-out guest’s quarters (and botching the job, from the sound of things) but her thoughts aren’t occupied with that either.

“And on top of that,” she's saying, “there’s the midsummer ball coming up—”

The Bog King pauses in the middle of shoving maps into an already overcrowded cabinet. “A _summer_ ball? Didn’t you just have a spring ball?”

“There was one for Dawn's birthday too,” Marianne says, with an air of resignation. “And one for the full moon, and a new moon, and one for Dawn’s pet aphid’s birthday.”

“Sounds terrible,” Bog observes.

Marianne leans forward, about to launch herself into an agreement that most likely will bleed into a diatribe, but stops. Her expression softens into a vague wistfulness. She catches the twirling hammer with a half-hearted snap of the wrist.

“Well, they’re always worse when you’re alone.” She unfolds from the chair and steps deftly down the stack of crates underneath it, wandering across the floor to the place where a rough survey was pinned to the wall. She looks at it, but she doesn't really see it. “I used to have fun, I guess,” she says. “It didn’t used to be so… lonely.”

Bog clicks his fingers together nervously. He is thinking that, while he certainly does not relish the prospect of a night surrounded by cheery field fairies chittering about the growing season and high fashion, on the other hand the very specter of Marianne alone on that future evening makes him bite his lip. It's not difficult to imagine her lurking dully around the punchbowl, fending off suicidally determined suitors, observing the night pass gaily around her in a whirl of satisfaction she cannot touch, as vapid as it is sincere.

There's his world, the dark and the dampness of the woods and the informality and the solitude, and then there's her world... the light and gaiety and the crowds and the decorum. They both, he is finding, have their ugliness. They both have something to recommend them. And he's never enjoyed anything half so much as he enjoys the world with Marianne in it—even the boring and the uncomfortable become magical in the places she where touches them. He could stand to go back. He could stand just about anything if Marianne stood beside him, he thinks.

“How,” Bog starts, pauses to cough uncertainly, and then continues, “how do you attend a ball, properly, then?”

Marianne shrugs vaguely. “You walk in and there’s a bit of fanfare.”

“Just… walk in?”

Marianne turns around, finally. “Well,” she amends, “usually you walk in with your date. My dad usually drags me along. And you have to do this little royal walk.”

Bog shifts his weight, looks down at his feet. “Ahm,” he says. “Show me?”

Marianne’s expression clouds with puzzlement for a moment, and then she lights up like the sun across the unbroken sky. The Bog King had never before longed for the deluge of sunlight his neighbors were so obsessed with, but in moments like these he thinks he can understand why the children of the kingdom beyond the forest chanted away the incursion of rainy days. Marianne bounds across the room with such force that when her arm slots under his, the momentum spins them across the floor, their wings beating desperately to avoid collision with walls and partly unpacked crates.

She flicks a lock of hair out of her eyes, glancing sheepishly at the nearest crate. “Here,” she says, a little short of breath. “Put your hand over mine.”

Bog hesitates only a fraction of a second.

“Okay, great,” Marianne says. She clamps her arm down on his, forcing him to stumble into the right position. “Alright. Let’s walk.”

They walk.

✿ ❀ ❁

There is a room in the new stronghold—built beneath the roots of an oak even deeper in the swamp, a monstrous waterlogged thing—that Bog won’t let Marianne tour. It’s not ready, he says. The crews of goblins have been at work from twilight to dusk carving and flooring and weaving together a new citadel nearly from scratch, half of it buried in the earth. They’ve been working since the solstice. Every other room is safe enough to walk in now, and Bog has already moved into his own chambers, rough around the corners as they are. “Not ready” is a poor and suspicious excuse.

Marianne slips out of the bedroom one evening, after she’s certain Bog has collapsed with exhaustion. She’s been staying with him. His rooms are the only habitable ones, after all, and there’s too much work to be done to fly home every night. Honestly, they do work hard. She’s entertained certain notions on late nights, with the glowlights washing the King in ethereal warmth, notions of his spines and plates mapped under her determined hands. She thinks he knows it too—he gets flustered sometimes and knocks over pieces on their map. She found a model house underneath his chair yesterday. But all they do these days is work—there’s so much work to be done. Bog is a constant clatter and buzz of exhaustion, trying to plan a fortress and run a kingdom all at once. At least Marianne has her father to run all the day-to-day back home. She’s been trying to quietly pick up the slack where she can, but Bog always seems to notice, and he always wants to be involved.

He snores, too. Marianne has never met a cleverer, more endearing creature, but she is seriously thinking about investing in some ear plugs. She slips off the long couch she’s been bunking on, landing fingers and toes on the rough wooden floor, and then tiptoes out. The door is too new to squeak. She’s pretty proud of herself.

She’s quiet in the halls, although there’s hardly anyone here except the outer guards. Bog has deflected her questions enough times that she would hardly be surprised to find somebody watching the door. And yet, when she arrives, there is nothing but the unassuming door itself. Her hand pauses over the knob, carved in an abstract shape that reminds her of flowers. There was a story she heard as a child, about a wife who was forbade to ever enter a certain room in her new husband’s home. Her nursemaids wouldn’t finish the story after they noticed her listening, but she’s fairly certain the fantastical room contained something nasty. Nasty enough that her nursemaids wouldn’t tell her about it. She wishes now, with her hand on the doorknob, that she had ever found out what it was.

She sucks in a breath to calm her pounding heart, and pulls open the door.

At first it’s too dark to make out, but as her eyes adjust she begins to discern the shapes of furniture. A table. A high-posted bed, hung with spidersilk as delicate and luxurious as anything she’s ever seen. A wall inlaid with polished stone, purples and variegated browns, some kind of mosaic half finished. She steps inside, as if she’s entering into a venerable ruin. The ceiling itself is carved into a dip that holds a single unlit lantern, its panels ornate and studded with spikes. Even unfinished, she’s never seen anything quite so darkly elegant. Is this for Griselda? But Griselda’s room is at the north end, she’s been fussing over the construction crews for weeks.

“Ach,” says a tired voice behind her, “must you spoil every surprise?”

She whirls, face hot. In the hall there is Bog, digging the heel of one palm into his eye. He looks half asleep standing up.

“Go back to bed,” she says, somewhat alarmed to find her hands on her hips. She’s using the older sister voice too, she notes.

Bog makes an unimpressed noise. He lists to the side, slightly, and then manages to straighten up somewhat. “Well,” he says, after the moment of physical uncertainty has passed, “do you like it?”

“Do I—?”

Bog blinks, but he forgets to open his eyes again. “It’s obviously for you,” he says. “No one else on this side of the forest would care for all that floral edging. I had a peatmoss of a time finding craftsmen. So. Do you like it?”

Marianne turns back to the room, with its lovely furniture and gothic charm. “You had this made just for me?”

Bog makes another noise, this one hard to interpret. “You need your own room,” he says. “I want you to have…” He pauses here, forehead creasing. He still hasn’t remembered to open his eyes. “If you don’t think you’ll use it—”

“No,” Marianne cuts in, quickly, “no, I love it. I’ll love being here.”

She rests a hand against the door. Her own space, she thinks with a little awe. Her own space. Just for her. The stronghold is the very core of Bog’s life, the center and gravity of everything he does. It’s the thing, the throne, that ties his people and his family to him. She feels as if Bog has carefully opened up his chest and offered her a room in his heart. She feels heavy with meaning.

“I love it,” she says, as if that's enough.


End file.
